Queen of Clubs: Annabelle Neilson

Annabelle Neilson scares me a bit. Why? Well, she’s gorgeous: model skinny with Sports Illustrated knockers and a complexion that is a pale and uninterested advertisement for a life of living dangerously. And she has these dark lagoons for eyes, a mouth built for sin and that louche, matter-of-fact manner that’s hard-wired into your system when you are one of London’s Marlboro Lights-and-late-nights elite. But she’s also rather icy and formidable.

Annabelle has this cool knack of giving you full disclosure on the kind of stories that will curl your shirt collar and loosen your fillings – white-knuckle adventures, life-changing scrapes with authority, tales of high fashion and debauchery, you name it, all retold with a artful mix of shrugging insouciance and casual pride, without giving anything of herself away. She’s a tough one to crack, basically, and while I enjoy her company all right, I’m also pretty sure that were she to put her mind to it, she could probably take me in a fight.

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Prone to Waugh-ish one-liners such as, ‘I’ve just spent an amusing few days in Sierra Leone,’ and, ‘Naomi and I were holed up in these huge Moscow hotel suites with security guards on the door – I wasn’t even allowed to go out and buy my father caviar,’ Annabelle is the Gulfstream of social butterflies, the archetypal everywhere and nowhere babe. She flits between continents, often on a whim, her Rolodex of fabulous friends falling over themselves to provide for her.

Here she is with Naomi Campbell, Rosemary Ferguson, David and Lucy Tang, Sophie Dahl, Jay Jopling, Damien Hirst and Jake Chapman in London. Or with John Galliano in Paris. Or partying with Russell Simmons and David Blaine in LA, posing with Tom Ford and Sarah Jessica Parker at the AngloMania Costume Institute Gala in New York, orchestrating a swimming-pool riot at a party in Monaco, lounging at Blenheim or shooting at Orlando Montagu’s country pad.

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Since splitting from former husband Nat Rothschild back in 1998, Annabelle, 37, has been romantically linked with Eddie ‘Speggy’ Spencer-Churchill, Jefferson Hack, Will Ricker, Kettle Crisps heir Karta Healy and, more recently, an unidentified boy more than a decade younger than herself. At the moment she’s single – and this doesn’t seem to concern her overly.

She has always had men jumping through hoops for her. There are dozens of hopeless, terminal Annabelle cases, in London and beyond, who would gladly take a bullet for Ms Neilson if it meant they could spend a few delirious moments locked in her beguiling cross-hairs.

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Certainly, you come away from a couple of hours in her company having been regaled with her alarming penthouse-and-pavement story, feeling like a bit of a lightweight, as if you haven’t lived, that you should dance that bit closer to the flame every now and then.

Today, however, Annabelle has her sensible hat on. She’s sitting opposite me, ordering a cup of tea, silver mink coat (Alexander McQueen) at her side, proffering a business card that says ‘Annabelle Neilson, Marketing Development Manager’. Carlos Almada, the genial New Yorker behind the rapidly shaping subterranean pleasure bunker of Automat on Berkeley Street, Mayfair (soon to offer cavernous dining facilities, a private members’ lounge, a nightclub, a cocktail bar and a library), has given her a job drumming up business for the club. In fact, there’s only one thing stopping her from becoming Mayfair’s answer to Amy Sacco: ‘I have this really terrible problem remembering people’s names. It’s all part of my dyslexia. It can get me into some really embarrassing situations, but people who know me well know it’s just a character quirk, and don’t take it personally.’

Dyslexia runs in her family, she tells me. Her dad Max had it too, but became a successful financier. Her grandfather also suffered from it but had a career as a surgeon. Annabelle, meanwhile, still writes backwards sometimes. But she’s coping well with the children’s storybook she’s writing, On the Pond, which presents her stellar set of Primrose Hill friends as various Wind in the Willows-type characters. ‘Thank God for spellcheck, I say.’

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But not being able to read and write to standard blighted the early part of Annabelle’s life. Packed off at the age of 11 to join her elder sister Camilla (‘Millie’, now an artist) at Cobham Hall in Gravesend, Kent (where she befriended jeweller Francesca Amfitheatrof), she was a woeful underachiever and her self-esteem took many knocks. ‘I think you have to be very careful with dyslexics,’ she says. ‘I just got really sick of people telling me that I was stupid. School was like St Trinian’s and I hated it.’ Choosing to stay in bed instead of taking her O-levels, she left without a single qualification.

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‘The thing was, I didn’t want to be at school… or at home,’ she says. Her mother, Marquesa Elizabetta Campus di Santinelli, suggested the teenager follow her maverick cousin Guy Greville, now the Earl of Warwick (then styled Lord Brooke), to Perth, Australia, where he owned a successful fruit-bottling company. It was here Annabelle’s pedal-to-the-metal vagabond spirit found its first home. She fell in love with dusty Australia, and now has a house there.

Annabelle Neilson with Alexander McQueen

Richard Young / Rex Features

She also dabbled with modelling after meeting former Tatler fashion director Issy Blow on a shoot for a Smirnoff advertisement in 1994. Impressed by her attitude and modishly gaunt bone structure, Issy took her to meet Alexander McQueen in his East End studio. McQueen, a fashion rookie back then, was struggling to keep his business going. They became firm friends.

She appeared in one of his catwalk shows and soon afterwards became his muse. ‘The moment I met Lee [McQueen] I saw something in him – a twinkle in his eye, I think. I liked him immediately but our friendship developed slowly and carefully. It took about five years before we became proper friends.’ What do they have in common? ‘Looking at him and knowing about his background and upbringing, it’s easy to assume that he’d be tough and a bit harsh,’ she says. ‘But it’s all an act, really. Behind all that he’s the kindest, gentlest, most loyal person you could ever wish to meet. And after spending a lot of time with him I realised that we were quite similar, even though our backgrounds are very different. A lot of people think I am a bit of a tough nut too. But once you get beyond that…’

Still McQueen’s muse, Annabelle has recently signed with the Storm modelling agency. ‘At my age! How mad is that?’ Not that mad, actually, because coquettish Annabelle has always known how to work the camera. Who can forget the money shot of her, all knock-kneed and ankle-booted, standing next to Naomi Campbell and Meg Mathews at Monte Carlo’s Vogue/Laureus Ball in 2000, wearing a John Galliano creation apparently fashioned from a length of cobweb? With just a black G-string to prevent her déshabillé from being full-frontal porno, Annabelle revealed her rather magnificent body to the world’s paparazzi.

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Annabelle Neilson with Meg Matthews and Naomi Campbell

Richard Young/ Rex Features

This was, of course, classic post-divorce Annabelle. She’d met Nat Rothschild – heir to Jacob Rothschild and a family fortune of an estimated £500 million – on a beach in India. They’d dated for a few years before eloping to the Dominican Republic to get married in November 1995, surprising both sets of parents. The bride wore McQueen, of course.

The marriage lasted three years. Their relationship was, by all reports, wild and tempestuous, and her settlement is said to have been several million. Exactly how many we’ll never know. I’m far too polite to ask, and Annabelle is far too smart to tell me.

‘Listen,’ she says, fixing me with an intense, forbidding stare. ‘You don’t fall in love with a title. You fall in love with a person. And that’s all I’m saying. I’ve never talked about Nat and he’s never talked about me. We made an agreement and we’ve stuck to it. I don’t intend to break that promise now.’

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‘Divorce is like being on drugs, in a way,’ she adds philosophically. ‘You have to stay clean for a year after your marriage has finally ended before you can say that you are really over it. You have to keep your mouth shut for a while before you can go around telling people you are fully recovered.’

Would she marry again? Does she want to have kids? ‘At my age you have to ask yourself, do you want to have a child just for yourself, or do you want to do it because you are in love?’ I think that she’d prefer the latter option.

The lucky chap who eventually tames her will have to be made of girders, because Annabelle likes living on the edge. She's a hell of a guy. ‘There’s only one thing that scares me,' she tells you, 'and that’s the dark. I still have to sleep with the light on… Oh, and when I go to the dentist I have to have major anaesthetic – pretty much out cold – even if I’m just having my teeth cleaned.’